It's actually relatively simple.

Adding dependencies comes with advantages and downsides. You need to strike a balance between them. External libraries can help implement things that you better don't implement yourself, so the answer is certainly not "no dependencies". But there are downsides and risks, and the risks grow with the number of dependencies.

In the world of NPM, people think those simple truths don't apply to them and the downsides and risks of dependencies can be ignored. Then you end up with thousands of transitive dependencies.

They're wrong and learn it the hard way now.